Dear NMR Colleagues,
In attempting to get through to (dirty word coming up; brace yourself) the U.S. Congress, I have learned of the following routes of influence lately here on the Illinois campus.
First, contact your campus Vice Chancellor of Research (or similar). They are charged with looking out for research interests on campus. Remind them that teaching is part of the research mission of a college and university if your NMR spectrometers are used in teaching.
Secondly, I recently became aware of the fact that the University of Illinois has a physical office and human representative in Washington, DC. Our entity is called the "Office of Government Relations". Our Vice Chancellors of Research contacted him, and his says he is in communication with our Senators about the helium stewardship bill. He says the issue is "on the radar" in Congress. Alas, no action yet.
Finally, I recommend contacting your campus Director of Purchasing (or similar). Our Director phoned me out of the blue last week to say she had been informed by the campus helium vendor that contracted delivered amounts of liquid helium are expected to fall short, and it wasn't his fault. She wanted to know about our local vendor (who is great), but the discussion quickly veered to talk of Congress and recycling helium on campus, which we still do not do. She was quite shocked at the whole issue, and has suddenly become our biggest non-chemist pusher of helping address the threat of shortages, and re-visiting our intent to recycle campus helium which we never got off the ground last year.
C & EN is about to publish a fresh story on the helium problem.
We are all accustomed to being hindered by the realities of scientific results. However, being hampered and preoccupied by politics is especially frustrating.
All best regards,
Dean
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Dean L. Olson, Ph.D.
Director, NMR Lab, 146 Roger Adams Lab
School of Chemical Sciences
U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
600 S. Mathews, Box 81-5, MC-712
Urbana, IL 61801 USA
Lab: 217-244-0564; Cell: 217-722-9432
dolson_at_illinois.edu<mailto:dolson_at_illinois.edu>
http://scs.illinois.edu/nmr
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Received on Mon Sep 16 2013 - 08:03:38 MST